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Men of the year: Ian Hislop

The fearless editor of Private Eye on the publication’s genius royal baby cover…

“I can’t think of a higher accolade than being one of ShortList’s Men Who Owned 2013; forget the Order Of Merit, this is the big one. I’m glad you liked the royal baby cover. It was a last-minute thing. I came into the office on a Monday, I think, and it felt like we’d been waiting for this baby forever. There was a huge amount of hype, people on ladders outside hospitals, BBC correspondents interviewing US correspondents on how long they’d been waiting. I remember watching a constitutional expert telling us what would happen if Kate had twins and one was a girl and the other became a Muslim. On this Monday, the baby arrived and I was a bit fed up with it all, so I wrote ‘Woman has baby’ on a bit of paper, with ‘Inside: some other stuff’ underneath. We had no pictures we could use, and had to go to press that night, so we mocked it up as a cover, and it seemed funny so we went with it. We didn’t have any other ideas.”